Iraq war necessary, despite intelligence errors

The intelligence may have been unsound on weapons of mass destruction, but that does not mean it was wrong to go to war in Iraq.

The governments of the United States, Britain and Australia are routinely accused of selective use of intelligence material to over-dramatise the case for war in Iraq. But imagine, for a moment, the contrary: what if it emerges that they under-played some aspects of the intelligence about the dangers of Saddam Hussein's degenerate rule?

In an increasingly corrupt and chaotic Iraq, for example, how great were the risks that the knowhow arising from two decades of chemical and biological weapons research would sooner rather than later find its way onto the black market ... if it hasn't happened already.

The Iraq weapons debate has been turbo-charged in recent days by the disclosures of US weapons inspector David Kay, particularly his assessment that Saddam's regime had no large stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons at the time the US-led coalition invaded.

This has confirmed a serious intelligence failure in the lead-up to war. Kay is calling for an independent inquiry to investigate and make recommendations that would reduce the risk of similar failures in the future. Rightly so. These are crucial issues of reliability and trust.

But does this intelligence debacle invalidate the decisions taken by George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard? Not if you listen to the extended views of David Kay.

As one of America's foremost weapons experts, Kay's public testimony this week before the US Senate Armed Services Committee is a must read for anyone with a genuine interest in trying to get closer to the truth of the matter.

Kay says the world is fast losing the battle to prevent the spread of the technologies involved in the production of weapons of mass destruction. Although Iran, Libya and Pakistan come immediately to mind, Kay estimates as many as 50 nations have either the capacity or aspiration to assemble these weapons. The global protocols to control WMD are all but moribund.

Against that backdrop, and given Saddam's regime had defied a series of UN resolutions demanding complete disclosure and disarmament, Kay argues that decisive action was not only necessary, but came not a moment too soon.

Kay rejects utterly the claim that intelligence analysts were pressured by their political masters to serve up only those conclusions that conformed with the need to prosecute the case for war. Why, then, did they get it so wrong?

His explanation involves a host of considerations, from reduced investment by the US on sound, old-fashioned human intelligence, to the difficulty of keeping track of events inside closed societies such as Iraq, as well as the pressure September 11 put on the US intelligence community to never again underestimate a threat.

But, as Kay stresses, to say there were glaring errors and miscalculations in intelligence assessments is not the same as saying there was no threat from Saddam's Iraq. Nor does it necessarily bolster the argument that UN weapons inspectors should have been left to get on with job.

Kay says his investigators have gathered first-hand from Iraqis involved in the weapons program evidence that was obscured from UN inspectors to the very last: "We have learned things that no UN inspector could ever have learned, given the terror regime of Saddam and the tremendous personal consequences that scientists had to run by speaking the truth ... I suspect regardless of how long they stayed, that attitude would have been the same."

From his own discoveries in Iraq, Kay argues there were multiple dangers posed by Saddam's regime. One was the capability to restart germ and gas warfare programs at relatively short notice, and threaten Iraq's neighbours.

The other was less overt, but more alarming. Kay argues much of the world does not understand the extent to which Saddam's regime, towards the end, had descended into little more than a "criminal terrorist conspiracy", and how this greatly increased the risk that the WMD know-how could be sold to other rogue nations, or extremists with evil intent: "I think the way the society was going, and the number of willing buyers in the market, that was probably a risk that, if we did avoid, we barely avoided."